“… Weeeelll … I … okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?”
“I’ll talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she’s like. But I’ll talk to her for sure.”
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail … from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my chosen constituency … and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: “Who? Him? Whynt’cha tell him to jus’ go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can’t even ride a bike!”
Which was true.
And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie’s face begin to soften and change?—did Evie’s hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent?—and weren’t those Evie’s fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny’s temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline?—and did Evie say or did she not: “Now you, f’r instance: you’re cute”? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.
Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?
“Don’t make me sick, Allah,” my sister said when I tried—rather nobly, considering how he’d failed me—to argue Sonny’s case. The voters had given the thumbs-down to us both.
I wasn’t giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns—who never cared about me, I’m bound to admit—led me inexorably towards my fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)
Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off from my trans-subcontinental rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. “Forget middlemen,” I advised myself, “You’ll have to do this personally.” Finally, I formed my scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine … guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.
Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the center of five wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists … while I stood beside her, bikeless. Until Evie’s coming I’d shown no interest in wheels, so I’d never been given any … humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie’s tongue.
“Where’ve you been living, fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?”
“No,” I lied penitently, and she relented. “Okay, okay,” Evie shrugged, “Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou’re made of.”
Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, “Gotcha balance yet? No? Geez, nobody’s got all year!”—as Evie and I perambulated, I felt … what’s the word? … happy.
Roundandroundand … Finally, to please her, I stammered, “Okay … I think I’m … let me,” and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable across the circus-ring … I heard her shouting: “The brake! Use the goddamn brake, ya dummy!”—but my hands couldn’t move, I had gone rigid as a plank, and there LOOK OUT in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim, collision course, OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY, Sonny in the saddle, trying to swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right but I went the same way EEYAH MY BIKE and silver wheel touched blue, frame kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had embarked on an identical parabola towards me CRASH bicycles fell to earth beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace CRASH suspended in mid-air Sonny and I met each other, Sonny’s head greeted mine … Over nine years ago I had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging temples found their way into Sonny’s hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes, fortunately, WHUMMP and for a moment the world went away.
Then Evie with her freckles on fire, “O ya little creep, ya pile of snot, ya wrecked my …” But I wasn’t listening, because circus-ring accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I’d never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north south east west … the other children born during that midnight hour, calling “I,” “I,” “I” and “I.”
“Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? … Hey, where’s his mother?”
Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie’s domain … and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous children of ticktock, I’m being whisked away by Frontier Mail—spirited off to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well. What can’t be cured must be endured.
That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth, which had by now grown into the seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan; their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey’s fading red pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the bitter aroma of Alia’s spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.
One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather’s dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself—as a crumbling old man in whose center, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he’d fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion … meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif’s despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children’s play, and found, in an old leather attaché-case on top of my grandfather’s almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage.
But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a corn field and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz’s toilet): taking me under his wing—and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident—he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn’t intend this one to stay secret for very long.
… And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: “Ohé, maharaj! Open up, great sir!”—fare-dodgers’ voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head—and then back to Bomba
y Central Station, and the drive home past race-course and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.
“Home again!” the Monkey shouts. “Hurry … Back-to-Bom!” (She is in disgrace. In Agra, she incinerated the General’s boots.)
It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr. Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories.” But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras—known today as Tamil Nadu—enclosed the aficionados of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (“United Maharashtra Party”) which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad (“Great Gujarat Party”) which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch … I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati’s boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold’s Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred—and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, “What’s to be scared of? We’re only going halfway for a peek”? … Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American chief. (“They killed Doctor Narlikar—marchers did,” Hairoil warned us in a shivery voice. Evie spat on his shoes.)
But I, Saleem Sinai, had other fish to fry. “Evie,” I said with quiet offhandedness, “how’d you like to see me bicycling?” No response. Evie was immersed in the spectacle … and was that her fingerprint in Sonny Ibrahim’s left forcep-hollow, embedded in Vaseline for all the world to see? A second time, and with slightly more emphasis, I said, “I can do it, Evie. I’ll do it on the Monkey’s cycle. You want to watch?” And now Evie, cruelly, “I’m watching this. This is good. Why’d I wanna watch you?” And me, a little snivelly now, “But I learned, Evie, you’ve got to …” Roars from Warden Road below us drown my words. Her back is to me; and Sonny’s back, the backs of Eyeslice and Hairoil, the intellectual rear of Cyrus-the-great … my sister, who has seen the fingerprint too, and looks displeased, eggs me on: “Go on. Go on, show her. Who’s she think she is?” And up on her bike … “I’m doing it, Evie, look!” Bicycling in circles, round and round the little cluster of children, “See? You see?” A moment of exultation; and then Evie, deflating impatient couldn’t-care-less: “Willya get outa my way, fer Petesake? I wanna see that!” Finger, chewed-off nail and all, jabs down in the direction of the language march; I am dismissed in favor of the parade of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti! And despite the Monkey, who loyally, “That’s not fair! He’s doing it really good!”—and in spite of the exhilaration of the thing-in-itself—something goes haywire inside me; and I’m riding round Evie, fasterfasterfaster, crying sniffing out of control, “So what is it with you, anyway? What do I have to do to …” And then something else takes over, because I realize I don’t have to ask her, I can just get inside that freckled mouth-metalled head and find out, for once I can really get to know what’s going on … and in I go, still bicycling, but the front of her mind is all full up with Marathi language-marchers, there are American pop songs stuck in the corners of her thoughts, but nothing I’m interested in; and now, only now, now for the very first time, now driven on by the tears of unrequited love, I begin to probe … I find myself pushing, diving, forcing my way behind her defenses … into the secret place where there’s a picture of her mother who wears a pink smock and holds up a tiny fish by the tail, and I’m ferreting deeperdeeperdeeper, where is it, what makes her tick, when she gives a sort of jerk and swings round to stare at me as I bicycle roundandroundand-roundandroundand …
“Get out!” screams Evie Burns. Hands lifted to forehead. I bicycling, wet-eyed, diving ininin: to where Evie stands in the doorway of a clapboard bedroom holding a, holding a something sharp and glinty with red dripping off it, in the doorway of a, my God and on the bed a woman, who, in a pink, my God, and Evie with the, and red staining the pink, and a man coming, my God, and no no no no no …
“GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!” Bewildered children watch as Evie screams, language march forgotten, but suddenly remembered again, because Evie has grabbed the back of the Monkey’s bike WHAT’RE YOU DOING EVIE as she pushes it THERE GET OUT YA BUM THERE GET OUT TO HELL!—She’s pushed me hard-as-hard, and I losing control hurtling down the slope round the end of the U-bend downdown, MY GOD THE MARCH past Bank Box Laundry, past Noor Ville and Laxmi Vilas, AAAAA and down into the mouth of the march, heads feet bodies, the waves of the march parting as I arrive, yelling blue murder, crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl’s bike.
Hands grabbing handlebars as I slow down in the impassioned throng. Smiles filled with good teeth surround me. They are not friendly smiles. “Look look, a little laad-sahib comes down to join us from the big rich hill!” In Marathi which I hardly understand, it’s my worst subject at school, and the smiles asking, “You want to join S.M.S., little princeling?” And I, just about knowing what’s being said, but dazed into telling the truth, shake my head No. And the smiles, “Oho! The young nawab does not like our tongue! What does he like?” And another smile, “Maybe Gujarati! You speak Gujarati, my lord?” But my Gujarati was as bad as my Marathi; I only knew one thing in the marshy tongue of Kathiawar; and the smiles, urging, and the fingers, prodding, “Speak, little master! Speak some Gujarati!”—so I told them what I knew, a rhyme I’d learned from Glandy Keith Colaco at school, which he used when he was bullying Gujarati boys, a rhyme designed to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language:
Soo ché? Saru ché!
Danda lé ké maru ché!
How are you?—I am well!—I’ll take a stick and thrash you to hell! A nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness … but when I’d recited them, the smiles began to laugh; and then voices near me and then further and further away began to take up my chant, HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL!, and they lost interest in me, “Go go with your bicycle, masterji,” they scoffed, I’LL TAKE A STICK AND THRASH YOU TO HELL, I fled away up the hillock as my chant rushed forward and back, up to the front and down to the back of the two-day-long procession, becoming, as it went, a song of war.
That afternoon, the head of the procession of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti collided at Kemp’s Corner, with the head of a Maha Gujarat Parishad demonstration; S.M.S. voices chanted “Soo ché? Saru ché!” and M.G.P. throats were opened in fury; under the posters of the Air-India rajah and of the Kolynos
Kid, the two parties fell upon one another with no little zeal, and to the tune of my little rhyme the first of the language riots got under way, fifteen killed, over three hundred wounded.
In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra—so at least I was on the winning side.
What was it in Evie’s head? Crime or dream? I never found out; but I had learned something else: when you go deep inside someone’s head, they can feel you in there.
Evelyn Lilith Burns didn’t want much to do with me after that day; but, strangely enough, I was cured of her. (Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central—perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the center of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps—one must consider all possibilities—they always made me a little afraid.)
My Tenth Birthday
“OH MISTER, WHAT to say? Everything is my own poor fault!” Padma is back. And, now that I have recovered from the poison and am at my desk again, is too overwrought to be silent. Over and over, my returned lotus castigates herself, beats her heavy breasts, wails at the top of her voice. (In my fragile condition, this is fairly distressing; but I don’t blame her for anything.)
“Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! What creatures we are, we women, never for one moment at peace when our men lie sick and low … I am so happy you are well, you don’t know!”